Processes and Patterns at the Macro-Scale: Crete and Beyond

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Quentin Letesson ◽  
Carl Knappett
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Bronze Age ◽  
Settlement Patterns ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
General Idea ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Sociopolitical Complexity ◽  
Bay Area ◽  
Regional Dynamics ◽  
Macro Scale

Zooming out, we first reach the various regions that compose Crete (e.g. west Crete, Mesara, north-central Crete, Malia-Lasithi zone, Mirabello Bay area, east Crete) and then the whole island itself. This is the macro-scale where settlement patterns can be observed and ‘which may see low-level exchange, competition, close affiliations; a whole range of potential scenarios, including “states”’ (Knappett 2012: 395). Further out, we might speak of the global scale, that of the supra-regional, with connections beyond the island to the Cyclades, Asia Minor, the Greek mainland, and so on. Although we have a general idea of how settlement patterns evolved during the Cretan Bronze Age (Driessen 2001; see also Bevan 2010 for an up-to-date synthesis), limitations at the micro- and meso-scale clearly also constrain our understanding of the macro-scale. Nevertheless, starting with Sir Arthur Evans (1928: 60–92), who was particularly interested in roads and how they connected specific settlements both in central and east Crete to support his view of Knossian overarching power (see also Warren 1994: 189, n.3), an interest in broader regional dynamics and top-down approaches to sociopolitical complexity was always prominent in Aegean archaeology (Cherry 1984; Renfrew 1972; Renfrew and Cherry 1986). This focus on site hierarchies has motivated a broad range of studies, from comparative material culture analysis (e.g. Knappett 1999) to surface surveys and associated tests which provided invaluable information on road networks (e.g. Müller 1991; Tzedakis et al. 1989; Tzedakis et al. 1990) and settlement distribution (for extensive bibliography and synthesis, see Driessen 2001; Whitelaw 2012). Although recent surveys clearly increase the temporal and spatial resolution of our data sets (e.g. Haggis 2005; Watrous 2012; Whitelaw, Bredaki, and Vasilakis 2006–7), they still have considerable gaps. For example, compared to central and east Crete, relatively few sites have been identified in the west of the island. This problem was recently tackled by Bevan and Wilson (2013), who devised a model for exploring settlement locations, hierarchies, and interconnections despite our incomplete dataset (see also chapters 12 and 15).

scholarly journals Isotopic evidence for population dynamics in the Central Italian Copper Age and Bronze Age.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Romboni ◽  
Ilenia Arienzo ◽  
Mauro Antonio Di Vito ◽  
Carmine Lubritto ◽  
Monica Piochi ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Bronze Age ◽  
Central Italy ◽  
Copper Age ◽  
Mobility Patterns ◽  
The North ◽  
Regional Dynamics ◽  
Isotopic Analyses ◽  
Middle Bronze Age ◽  
C And N

The mobility patterns in the Italian peninsula during prehistory are still relatively unknown. The excavation of the Copper Age and Bronze Age deposits in La Sassa cave (Sonnino, Italy) allowed to broaden the knowledge about some local and regional dynamics. We employed a multi-disciplinary approach, including stable (carbon and nitrogen, C and N, respectively) and radiogenic (strontium, Sr) isotopes analyses and the identification of the cultural traits in the material culture to identify mobility patterns that took place in the region. The Sr isotopic analyses on the human bones show that in the Copper Age and at the beginning of the Bronze Age, the cave was used as a burial place by different villages, perhaps spread in a radius of no more than 5 km. Stable isotopes analyses suggest the introduction of C4 plants in the diet of the Middle Bronze Age (MBA) communities in the area. Remarkably, in the same period, the material culture shows increasing influxes coming from the North. This evidence is consistent with the recent genomic findings tracing the arrival of people carrying a Steppe-related ancestry in Central Italy in MBA.

Exploring Continuity and Discontinuity from the Early to the Middle Bronze Age in Central Oman

2019 ◽  
pp. 121-140
Author(s):  
Guillaume Gernez ◽  
Jessica Giraud
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Bronze Age ◽  
Settlement Patterns ◽  
Early Bronze Age ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
Middle Bronze Age ◽  
Longue Durée ◽  
Continuity And Discontinuity

This chapter presents new results of the excavations and surveys at Adam, Central Oman. The funerary landscape of the Early Bronze Age (3rd millennium BC) is characterized by collective burials in tower-tombs located on the crests and then large collective multi-compartment graves. From the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age (2nd millennium BC), a complete change is observed: the Wadi Suq graveyards show an important concentration of single burials in new forms of tombs (cists and cairns), all of which are located on the plain. Using the graveyards of Adam as an example, these two practices are compared in order to understand the evolution, continuity, and change of settlement patterns, material culture and society in the "longue durée."

Tradition and change

1994 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 98-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Lohof
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Bronze Age ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Settlement Patterns ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
The North ◽  
North Eastern ◽  
Middle Bronze Age ◽  
The Relationship

This article is based on the results of a project on social change in the Early and Middle Bronze Age in the north-eastern Netherlands, which ended in 1991. Although the project originally focused on the possible development of social stratification, here, the emphasis will be on the relationship between burial ritual and social change in general. Before embarking on the main argument, it should be understood that the link between burial ritual and social change by no means implies the view that burial ritual reflects all social changes which take place within a society, nor that the changes observed in the burial ritual are essential to an understanding of the society concerned. The burial ritual offers us no more than an opportunity to study past social changes. The resulting interpretations should be supported and tested by other expressions of material culture, such as those concerning economy and settlement patterns.

scholarly journals The Balkan-Aegean migrations revisited: Changes in material culture and settlement patterns in the Late Bronze age Central Balkans in light of new data

Starinar ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 61-105
Author(s):  
Aleksandar Bulatovic ◽  
Barry Molloy ◽  
Vojislav Filipovic
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Bronze Age ◽  
Settlement Patterns ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Personal Mobility ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
The North ◽  
River Valleys ◽  
Settlement Changes ◽  
Of Greece

Alleged ?Aegean migrations? have long been seen as underlying major transformations in lifeways and identity in the Balkans in the 12th-11th centuries BC. Revisiting the material culture and settlement changes in the north-south ?routeway? of the Velika Morava-Juzna Morava-Vardar/Axios river valleys, this paper evaluates developments within local communities. It is argued that mobility played an important role in social change, including an element of inward migration from the north. We argue that rather than an Aegean end point, these river valleys themselves were the destination of migrants. The prosperity this stimulated within those communities led to increased networks of personal mobility that incorporated elements from communities from the wider Carpathians and the north of Greece over the course of two centuries.

The Political Machine

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam T. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Bronze Age ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Mortuary Ritual ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Organized Violence ◽  
Political Sovereignty ◽  
Political Machine ◽  
Material Goods ◽  
The Bronze Age

This book investigates the essential role that material culture plays in the practices and maintenance of political sovereignty. Through an archaeological exploration of the Bronze Age Caucasus, the book demonstrates that beyond assemblies of people, polities are just as importantly assemblages of things—from ballots and bullets to crowns, regalia, and licenses. The book looks at the ways that these assemblages help to forge cohesive publics, separate sovereigns from a wider social mass, and formalize governance—and it considers how these developments continue to shape politics today. The book shows that the formation of polities is as much about the process of manufacturing assemblages as it is about disciplining subjects, and that these material objects or “machines” sustain communities, orders, and institutions. The sensibilities, senses, and sentiments connecting people to things enabled political authority during the Bronze Age and fortifies political power even in the contemporary world. The book provides a detailed account of the transformation of communities in the Caucasus, from small-scale early Bronze Age villages committed to egalitarianism, to Late Bronze Age polities predicated on radical inequality, organized violence, and a centralized apparatus of rule. From Bronze Age traditions of mortuary ritual and divination to current controversies over flag pins and Predator drones, this book sheds new light on how material goods authorize and defend political order.

scholarly journals Reproducing scientists’ mobility: a data-driven model

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Giacomo Vaccario ◽  
Luca Verginer ◽  
Frank Schweitzer
Keyword(s):  
Decision Rules ◽  
Migration Policy ◽  
Large Data ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Global Network ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Mobility Patterns ◽  
Agent Based ◽  
Hiring Process ◽  
Geographical Distances

AbstractHigh skill labour is an important factor underpinning the competitive advantage of modern economies. Therefore, attracting and retaining scientists has become a major concern for migration policy. In this work, we study the migration of scientists on a global scale, by combining two large data sets covering the publications of 3.5 million scientists over 60 years. We analyse their geographical distances moved for a new affiliation and their age when moving, this way reconstructing their geographical “career paths”. These paths are used to derive the world network of scientists’ mobility between cities and to analyse its topological properties. We further develop and calibrate an agent-based model, such that it reproduces the empirical findings both at the level of scientists and of the global network. Our model takes into account that the academic hiring process is largely demand-driven and demonstrates that the probability of scientists to relocate decreases both with age and with distance. Our results allow interpreting the model assumptions as micro-based decision rules that can explain the observed mobility patterns of scientists.

Cultural change and population dynamics during the Bronze Age: Integrating archaeological and palaeoenvironmental evidence for Schleswig-Holstein, Northern Germany

The Holocene ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (10) ◽  
pp. 1607-1621 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jutta Kneisel ◽  
Walter Dörfler ◽  
Stefan Dreibrodt ◽  
Stefanie Schaefer-Di Maida ◽  
Ingo Feeser
Keyword(s):  
Population Dynamics ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Bronze Age ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Food Production ◽  
Quantitative Information ◽  
Northern Germany ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Boom And Bust ◽  
The Bronze Age

In archaeology, change in material culture is viewed as indicating social or cultural transformation and is the basis of our typo-chronological classification of phases and periods. The material culture from northern Germany reveals both quantitative and qualitative changes during the Bronze Age. At the same time, there is also evidence for ‘boom and bust’ cycles in population density/size, as indicated by changing human impact on the environment in several Bronze Age palaeoenvironmental records. These demographic fluctuations may relate to the observed changes in social phenomena in aspects of ideology, technology, food production and habitation. For example, innovations in food production, such as the adoption of new crops and agricultural techniques, could have led to population growth. While usually viewed by archaeologists as a ‘negative’ development, population stress or collapse may have favoured the emergence of new cultural phenomena. In order to test the cause-and-effect relationship between population dynamics and sociocultural change, we synthesise the archaeological evidence – qualitative and quantitative information from settlements, deposition finds (hoards), burials, material culture and architectural remains – for the Bronze Age in northern Germany, mainly Schleswig-Holstein, and compare it with the boom and bust pattern seen in the palaeoenvironmental record. The synchronicity of changes at ca. 1500 BC and ca. 1100 BC reflects the relationship between phases of major sociocultural transformation in the archaeological datasets and booms and busts in the palaeoenvironmental record of the region seen as a proxies for palaeo-demography. This sets the stage for a better understanding of the transformation of practices and relationships in the Bronze Age communities of the region.

Unsustainable Capitalism

2001 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-34
Author(s):  
Allan Macinnes
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Culture Change ◽  
Critical Period ◽  
Settlement Patterns ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Important Distinction ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Individual

This paper makes an important, interdisciplinary contribution, to the ongoing debate on the transition from clanship to capitalism. Integral to this contribution is the important distinction between capitalism as an individualist ideology and capitalist societies where individualism is a widespread but not necessarily a universal ideology. His concern is not with the bipolar opposition of landlord and people which tends to dominate debates on the land issue in the Highlands. Instead, he focuses on material culture change in relation to landscape organisation, settlement patterns and morphology in order to examine how social relationships were structured during the critical period of estate re-orientation often depicted progressively as Improvement but regressively as clearance through the removal and relocation of population. His case study on Kintyre is particularly valuable. By scrutinising spatial as well as social relationships Dalglish demonstrates that clanship was based as much on daily practices of living as on an patrimonial ideology of kinship, practices which led the House of Argyll to attempt the reinvention of concepts of occupancy in order to emphasise the importance of the individual over the family through partitioned space.

scholarly journals Non-discursive Knowledge and the Construction of Identity Potters, Potting and Performance at the Bronze Age Tell of Százhalombatta, Hungary

2009 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandy Budden ◽  
Joanna Sofaer
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Bronze Age ◽  
Social Categories ◽  
Social Sphere ◽  
Construction Of Identity ◽  
Differential Acquisition ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Bronze Age

This article explores the relationship between the making of things and the making of people at the Bronze Age tell at Százhalombatta, Hungary. Focusing on potters and potting, we explore how the performance of non-discursive knowledge was critical to the construction of social categories. Potters literally came into being as potters through repeated bodily enactment of potting skills. Potters also gained their identity in the social sphere through the connection between their potting performance and their audience. We trace degrees of skill in the ceramic record to reveal the material articulation of non-discursive knowledge and consider the ramifications of the differential acquisition of non-discursive knowledge for the expression of different kinds of potter's identities. The creation of potters as a social category was essential to the ongoing creation of specific forms of material culture. We examine the implications of altered potters' performances and the role of non-discursive knowledge in the construction of social models of the Bronze Age.

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